While most research on hedging has focused on foreign currency exposures, analysis of jet fuel price exposure in the airline industry and the effects of both financial and operational hedging on this exposure provides valuable insights into risk management. Exposure and hedging in the airline industry is relatively straightforward compared to foreign exchange hedging by multinationals. We inves...

Project-financing and public-private partnership schemes are joint projects of investment that are generally submitted to investment valuation criteria based on compound discounting. However, the theoretical basis of these criteria is at issue nowadays. According to recent studies on relational contracting economics and behavioral finance, joint projects of investment can be considered as speci...

This paper addresses the hotly-debated question: do Chinese firms overinvest? A firm-level dataset of 100,000 firms over the period of 2000-07 is employed for this purpose. We initially calculate measures of investment efficiency, which is typically negatively associated with overinvestment. Despite wide disparities across various ownership groups, industries and regions, we find that corporate...

This paper studies the behavior of leverage ratios in a dynamic trade-off model with real frictions. Firms underutilize debt when financing investment to retain financial flexibility. Underutilization of debt persists even when firms exercise their last investment options, and it is more (less) severe for more back-loaded (front-loaded) investment opportunities. Thus, leverage dynamics cruciall...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an adverse selection insurance economy. We start from a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perceptions. We propose first and second welfare theorems, by means of which we describe efficiencyenhancing policies. Notions of weak and strong adverse selection are promising for interpreti...

While much accounting information is idiosyncratic in nature, economy-wide factors such as accounting standards affect the quality of idiosyncratic accounting information of many firms simultaneously. We study these two features of accounting information by embedding a parsimonious, moral hazard problem into the framework of a multi-firm economy in which project choices are endogenous to accoun...

A dividend imputation tax system provides shareholders with a tax credit that can be used to offset personal tax on dividend income. The size of this credit depends on tax paid at the corporate level so that the “double taxation” of dividends is effectively eliminated. This paper shows how to infer the value of imputation tax credits (which is an important input into the weighted-average cost o...

We study how interactions between financing and investment decisions can shape firm boundaries in innovative markets. In particular, we model innovative projects as growth options and ask whether they are best operated inside large incumbent firms (Integration) or in separate, specialized firms (Non-Integration). Starting from a standard theoretical framework, in which value-maximizing corporat...

This paper empirically examines whether additional future fixed capital and R&D investment expenditures induce firms to accumulate cash reserves while considering the role of market imperfections. Implementing a dynamic framework on a panel of US, UK and German companies, we find that firms make larger additions to cash holdings when they plan additional future R&D rather than fixed capital inv...

Option models have provided insight into the value of flexibility to switch from one state to another (such as switching a mine or refinery from operating to closed status). More complex flexible processes offer multiple possibilities for switching states. A fabrication facility, for example, may offer options to shift from the current status to any of several alternatives (reflecting reconfigu...